CFPs for Old English Panels at MLA 2025 in New Orleans – please share widely! Abstracts due by March 15.
INVISIBLE VIOLENCE AND ARCHIVAL ERASURE
Recent scholarship on early medieval England has provoked a reparative moment: as researchers, often early career scholars, engage newly explicitly diverse theoretical and political commitments, they ask us all to re-evaluate the ways that we determine our field and navigate the archives that constitute it. This session aims to foreground such important work and to consider not only ways that past scholarship and the medieval archive itself might perpetuate racist, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, transphobic, ablest, misogynist paradigms of thought and being, but also how a focus on this aspect of medieval and medievalist archives might enable some disentanglement of the violences, omissions, and silences of the archive from the perpetuation or creation of those violences in the scholarship.
Papers might include those that theorize Old English poetry and prose; study the history of scholarship that has perpetuated the abuses and omissions of the past; articulate methodologies that might uncover the lives of medieval people previously excised from scholarly histories; etc. Send a 250 word abstract and CV to Jennifer Lorden (jalorden@wm.edu) and Benjamin Saltzman (saltzman@uchicago.edu).
THE POETICS AND POLITICS OF VISIBILITY IN OLD ENGLISH
Much scholarship has considered how Old English literature handles sensory information, and in particular models of seeing or being seen, and how certain images and scenes evoke associations that resonate across the poetic corpus. At times, Old English poetry also temporarily withholds images from view, only for them to be revealed later with heightened effect. For its part, scholarship in the field has also focused attention on particular images of Old English poetry, leaving other aspects of the literature overlooked or even concealed.
This session invites papers considering how Old English poetry and the modern study thereof have made things visible or withheld them from view, or used figurative and literal depictions of vision. Approaches might range from studies of poetics to affect studies, disability studies to gender and sexuality, and/or considerations of the ways Old English texts handle the figurative and literal implications of sensory perception. Send a 250 word abstract and CV to Jennifer Lorden (jalorden@wm.edu) and Benjamin Saltzman (saltzman@uchicago.edu).
EXPERIMENTS IN NEW POETRY WITH OLD ENGLISH, OLD FRENCH, AND OLD SPANISH: A ROUNDTABLE
We invite poets who have engaged with or are interested in engaging with Old English, Old French, and/or Old Spanish to participate in a roundtable as an occasion to reflect on, speak to, or experiment with modes of translation, inspiration, revision, and other ways of creating in relation to the earliest forms of these languages. This special session is organized by members of the Poetry and Poetics Forum, the Old English Forum, the Medieval Iberian Forum, and the Medieval French Forum. Send 250 word abstract and CV to Benjamin Saltzman at saltzman@uchicago.edu.
Jennifer A. Lorden 